In an effort to compile and compare benchmark data for Linear Static FEA’s a SolidWorks forum thread was created on December 19, 2012. In the following weeks the post received 5600+ views and 160+ replies. Benchmark data from forum members was complied and compared. During this time it was observed that the results varied greatly from user to user. Users with very similar systems report vastly different results. With the effort of forum members the varied results were tracked down to a default system option that changed the contact set definition thus changing the solve time. During the investigation a second version of the benchmark (V2) was created in the original thread.

That thread has been abandoned and this thread created to start with a fresh set of data. As well the V2 benchmark file has been retired. The original thread can be found here.

Special thanks go to thank Iain McClatchie, Bill McEachern and Timothy Lawrence for their efforts in tracking down the problem. With there input we hopefully now have a working Linear Static FEA benchmark that will generate consistent, comparable results.

Contained in the attached ZIP file is the benchmark file (V3) and instructions on how to use it. There is also a video showing how to perform Step 3 of the instructions. If you have any comments please feel free.

If you have already posted results in the old thread and would like to participate in this new thread please download the V3 benchmark file, re-run the simulation and post your results in this thread.

Below are the results I got running the new Benchmark. Note that the number of equations differed slightly. I decided to do a 2nd run and was suprised to see that the number of equations was slightly different again than either yours or my first run. Even more curious was the fact that the number of contact elements changed to 6 on the 2nd run. Not sure what's up there--I checked the mesh setting on both runs before solving. Even so, the solve time was not very significantly different.

Could you do us a favour and rerun the test? Please set the simulation proces to use only one processor (4 cores). You can do that in the taskmanager, select the right process (probably cosmos) with the rmb and Set Affinity... This will give us some insight if for this particular study it is desirable to have two processors (8 cores) or if only one (4 cores) will do.

Good idea so I thought I'd try it. I figured only running cores 0-3 would put them all on the same physical processor, if that was mistaken let me know and I'll re-run it. I also upgraded from 12SP4 to 12SP5 so I re-ran the test with all 8 cores going for consistency.

Is it worth comparing not just CPU clockspeed for reference but also match against the test results from CPUBenchmark.net? As if there is good correlation with their scores it will make speccing a workstation a little easier.

We will never know if some mobos have sub optimal settings for jumpers or BIOS.

Comparing the 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo vs. 2.4 GHz i7, I guess that the Core 2 also has a 7200 rpm drive and that the difference is in the extra RAM which enables avoidance of pagefile swapping in a slow I/O environment.

I can provide you with a IGES version of the file, but the FEA setup won't be in it. You will have to manually redo the setup. I've been working on a setup procedure for older than SolidWorks 2012 users but it's not quite done yet. When i have it complete I'll post it for you and others to use.

Can you confirm your actual CPU clock speed? 3.2 GHz is the stock speed for you processor and based on your results I'm guessing your system is overclocked. I'm guessing somewhere around 4.0 GHz. If it is overclocked please update your post.

I run again the test with CoreTemp and CPU-Z to check temperatures and frequencies.

At 4.5Ghz the test takes 710-720 sec depending on how many tasks are running in Windows 8.

The max temperature running this benchmark and the standard SolidWorks benchmark is 55°. When running Prime95 the temperature reaches about 60°. Room temperature is set to 24° (maybe it is a little lower now). When the screen show was taken, Prime95 was running on all cores:

I am posting two results for the new system I have just put together. The first is for the standard Turbo setting for the processor (peaks at about 4.1 Ghz) and the second is for the extreme overclocking software setup (set at 4.74 Ghz). These clocking options are part of the ASUS motherboard control software that runs in windows.

I set the H100 fans to high so the system was noiser than I would like for a long period but the processor peaked early at only 64C max then settled down between 45C to 55C, so not bad and the fans never went to full rpm.

I didn't think to save results so I don't have either out file to post. If there is interest I can rerun the benchmarks and post the out files.

I'll run on SW2012 SP5 here in a bit to check on my machine if there's much difference. Also not 100% sure on the RAM speed, CPUZ is a bit cryptic to me on the true speed. Gives NB at 2600 MHz, DRAM at 537, FSB 2:8, and CR=2T. From DRAM*CR it should be ~1080 MHz, but the winstat memory test showed teh 1366 MHz value...

This machine is a little bit different than any of the other machines posted here. This is one of 2/3 virtual machine set up on a Dell PowerEdge R710. I'll first post the specs for the virtual machine then I'll post the details of the entire server.

Virtual Machine

Total Solution Time (sec) = 1333

Number of Equations (490875) = 490038

Active Contact Elements (28) = 28

SolidWorks Version and Service Pack = SWX2013 SP2

Computer Manufacturer = Virtual

Computer Model = NA

Operating System and Service Pack = Windows 7 Enterprise x64 SP 1

Graphics Card = None

CPU Brand = Intel

CPU Model = Xeon X5690

CPU Clock Speed = 3.47GHz

Cooing Type = Air Cooled

Number of Cores = 4

Hyper-Threading Enabled? = N

Amount of RAM = 60GB DDR3

RAM Manufacturer = Dell

RAM Speed = 1333 Mhz

Hard Drive Size = 80GB Windows Partition/ 224GB Data Partition

Hard Drive Type and RPM = NA

Server

Computer Manufacturer = Dell

Computer Model = PowerEdge R710

Approx System Cost = $10000

Operating System and Service Pack = VMware v Sphere 4 Standard

Graphics Card = None

CPU Brand = Intel

CPU Model = 2x Xeon X5690

CPU Clock Speed = 3.47GHz

Cooing Type = Air Cooled

Number of Cores = 2x 6

Hyper-Threading Enabled? = N

Amount of RAM = 96GB DDR3

RAM Manufacturer = Dell

RAM Speed = 1333 Mhz

Hard Drive Size = 2x 73 GB(VMware)/6x 300GB (virtual machines)

Hard Drive Type and RPM = SAS/SAS,15k/10k, 6Gbps/6Gbps, RAID 1/RAID 5

Misc Notes:

This box currently has the RAM from 2 of he virtual machines dedicated to it. The virtual machines can be taken down and resources reallocated as necessary. Typical run 2-5 machines simulateously. This and simulation box detailed in the previous post are exclusively used for steady state and transient(1k-2k step) thermal and flow simulations.

Update: 2 other studies were being run concurrently on a different virtual machine.

I've made some changes to the system since my original post with it early in the year. Most importantly I have swapped out motherboards. I had a motherboard failure with the ASUS P9X79 Deluxe I originally had in June and was sent a refurbished board with a highly intermittent hardware fault. After many weeks on my own then some professional help I fixed the system problem by replacing the motherboard. Net result is the system runs about 5% slower with the Gigabyte board in its current conservative overclock state.

My experience with ASUS support was very poor to the point where I will never use and do not recommend anyone else uses ASUS hardware. Hardware is nice but customer service is atrocious.

I also replaced all the fans with Noctua fans. A bit pricey but the silence is golden!

I tried to explain to IT that my box at home with a $320 i7-3770k would run circles around any Xeon box they could afford, but this newish machine is still four times faster than the old dual-cpu machine I had.

My computer seems pretty fast in comparison to some of these posted. I ran it twice with the same results. I double checked the step 3 and made sure it was checked. We are wanting to build a faster machine and that machine that Owen Buttigieg posted seems pretty quick. Why has no one posted a dual or even quad CPU AMD machine or any AMD machine for that matter? We were looking into the water cooled i7 3930 overclocked versus dual AMD opterons water cooled and overclocked and by the numbers the AMD's seem like it could be a smoking fast machine.

Anyways this is my first post on the forums, been following and searching threads for a long time just never posted.

I've been taking a look at all of the simulations you've done so far in the hope of deriving specs for my new machine. I thought I'd post up my analysis which summarises the data and conclusions from the data available up until now.

The first thing I noted is that solidworks 2013 is slower than solidworks 2012 for the same machine, so I scaled all the 2012 simulations to estimate how long they would take in 2013.

After having an initial play, it seems the most important factor in simulation speed is CPU speed, so I graphed CPU speed vs the 2013 normalised simulation times.

In the above plot, lower scores are better. You can see that CPU speed does have an effect though it's not spectacular.

The next question I had was how many cores should I get. So, I normalised the simulation times to ignore processor speed (assuming an inverse linear relationship between CPU speed and simulation time), then plotted against the number of cores.

It seems pretty clear from the above graph that number of cores matters until you get to 6, after which there is no discernable advantage (though more data with 8 cores might disprove this).

I then looked at any correlations with RAM speed or quantity with essentially no relationship found, suggesting that provided you have the 16GB most had, the speed and quantity don't really matter (though with large assemblies I expect it would matter).

Cool study, I have found this to be pretty accurate. We just built a 4930 core i7 liquid cooled (4.6 ghz) setup and can get 351 second sim times on the benchmark study. We haven't really even optimised our setup yet so I think we can pull some more. Oddly enough when I updated my graphics card driver I picked up a couple seconds so that may be somewhat of a variable. We have a W5000 AMD card.

these are basically the same results presented in the solidworks KB as performed by solidworks.

i'll add that something that makes a big difference is SSD.

and for your comment about ram. if you've got a million GB of ram and your problem only uses 1GB, it won't help. but if you're paging, because your problem needs 8GB of ram, having the ram will help. speed of RAM won't help unless there is a serious delta between the speeds.

I'm trying to figure out if it is worth upgrading to Xeon W3680 (passmark 9,178) from my current Xeon W3540 (passmark 5,442). I noticed during the simulation my processor speed was around 30% usage most of the time. The highest it went to was 50% and for the most part it is using all the cores on and off, CPU 6 was parked the whole time.

see previous discussions about processors. go with fastest individual core over multiple cores. if the new processor is faster than the old one from a core to core perspective, it is probably a worthy upgrade. but be weary that not all simulations respond the same to hardware improvements. this is well documented in the KB. Also i'd recommend having someone take a look at your problem setups if the solve time is what you're trying to reduce. Generally this is done through improved setup vs throwing hardware at it.

If the benchmark problem is representative of the type of work that you will be doing, then it doesn't look like 6 cores would help. From your comments, the benchmark normally only used two cores, sometimes going as high as three.

One of the problems I see in this discussion is the old data concerning 2012 and 2013 Simulation. I've run my i-7 3970x 3.5 Ghz machine across 2012 to 2014 SP2 and there is a big difference in the time the benchmark takes in the different versions. The greatest increase in performance comes in 2014 and is do to much better multicore utilization by the software. If memory serves 2012/2013 would only utilize 4 cores/8 threads and now 2014 utilizes all 6 cores/12 threads. Major time reduction over 2013 which, if I recall correctly, was actually slower than 2012. So if your running 2014 then the number of cores has a big impact, but I don't know what happens beyond 6 cores as that is all I have. Next biggest impact is core speed. I have overclocked my processor to 4.7 Ghz and I see significantly improved performance there. I actually routinely run the processor over clocked at 4.2 Ghz as it is rock solid stable there and I have never had any problems. I have also seen some small differences between the motherboard brands I've used but not enough to affect my work flow. I believe that the Xeon series of 8 core processors can't be over clocked so you don't see the higher processor speeds which would impact your performance. This may be the the cause of the slowdown you see in the data when your looking at the Xeon 8 core processors?

So if you have 2014 then I would recommend more cores with the fastest processor speed. It gets pricey though so you have to work your budget against the time savings. I would love to give a dual 2011 processor board with a couple of top of the line Xeons a test but that is way beyond my budget. IT departments may not be happy with the overclocks, but some machines come from vendors that way these days. I'm very pleased with my machine as I spend less time on routine problems setting up the simulations as the set up can be less efficient since I can solve so much faster than I could a few years ago. My old core duo quad core machine took about 45 minuites for the benchmark vs about 7 on my one year old 3970x setup.

Not sure this has any impact on Glenn's question but is food for thought. If he has access to 2014 he would pick up both the processor speed bump plus the additional core utilization. I would expect the 2012 bump would mostly be from the processor speed increase only.

That's great information on the imporvements that have been made in 2014 for utilizing multiple cores more efficiently. I tried out solidworks 2014 for a comparison on the same machine my time when from 17 minutes to 10 minutes. I can't believe the boost that 2014 gave it really makes good use of the 4 cores 8 threads that I currently have. The processor was at 80%+ for the majority of the simulation.

I am curious. Compare this with the post by Owen Buttigieg 10/8/2013. These machines should be similarly fast, but Owens is considerably faster. The biggest difference that I see is that he has a Quadro 4000 and I have a Quadro 2000. The video card should make no difference. We compared a 600 and the 2000 and found nearly identical performance for an FEA solution.

Ok I have done some tweaking if anybody interested. I have a 125Mhz bus with a multiplier of 37 to achieve 4625Mhz. I did get a clock od 4.6 with a 100 bus but the performance did not change and the solution was slightly slower. It just made a little more heat and no gain. I also have the ram clocked at 1333Mhz for 2666Mhz. The ram I have is only good for 2133Mhz so I have adjusted the timings to 16,18,18,36 clocks which is quite stable. I am not having any temperature issues and it is currently 28degC in my office. I would probably expect and good result from the 5930k as well. Looking for ward to what other people can get. Also the cpu does throttle with the power saving during the analysis. I might even try switching all c states off and see what happens because the mesh creation is done at the base clock speed.

Turning off all the power saving options resulted in a mesh time of 6 seconds and a solve time of 284 seconds. I did have one core hit 80 degC during the solve but most were below 70 and av was 60 degC. So I think for the average user the power saving options could be left on I know I certainly will to save on electricity. Have fun and if your not your own boss, beg borrow and steal for an upgrade. I think it will pay off for me because some of the models I solve take hours.

How long will it last, I don't know. I have had my 3930k clocked at 4.6 for nearly 3 years and it hasn't missed a beat. I have power saving mode enabled so it is in idle mode most of the time. I just ran the same analysis with 6 cores and found that the solve time was not considerably different. It was actually slightly better.